Quotes & Sayings About Elite

Elite is not a bad word, it's an aspirational one — Aaron Sorkin

... the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else? — Thomas Sowell

Think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy countries. It's the same phenomenon as in the Military Police and the Air Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don't feel all that bad. But can you imagine how difficult it must be to be depressed in a country where everyone else has a big smile on their face?2 Caroline Sacks's decision to evaluate herself, then, by looking around her organic chemistry classroom was not some strange and irrational behavior. It is what human beings do. We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school - except, perhaps, — Malcolm Gladwell

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up. — Dana Spiotta

Tyrants are willing to commit to anything ... including mass murder to maintain their domination over every human being alive. They abuse the lives of the people they are entrusted with by the perverse dictates that they, themselves, would never live by. And they feel justified in this by their own self-righteous elite morality, which sets them high above everyone else in their own minds.
You and I, however, are made of quite different stuff. Our words are filled with our true beliefs and backed by the honesty of our actions. We take great pride in not only who we are ... but overcoming the struggle it took to make us this way. We are men and women of character ... principles ... and courage! — R.G. Risch

Because there was no pre-existing patrician elite, those successful in the new book industry could write very swiftly to the top of the social hierarchy. — Andrew Pettegree

The US and UK governments' relentless backing for the global spread of genetically modified seeds was in fact the implementation of a decades long policy of the Rockefeller Foundation since the 1930's, when it funded Nazi eugenics research - i.e. mass-scale population reduction, and control of darker-skinned races by an Anglo-Saxon white elite. As some of these circles saw it, war as a means of population reduction was costly and not that efficient. — F. William Engdahl

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers. — Camille Paglia

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation. — William Deresiewicz

I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers ... Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them for ourselves. — Ronald Reagan

As always with any discussion of elite immunity, it's crucial to note that what makes this development such a particularly warped travesty is that the very same elites who enjoy this immunity have created the world's largest, and the Western world's most oppressive and merciless, penal state for ordinary citizens. — Glenn Greenwald

The phrase 'the fossil record' sounds impressive and authoritative. As used by some persons it becomes, as intended, intimidating, taking on the aura of esoteric truth as expounded by an elite class of specialists. But what is it, really, this fossil record? Only data in search of interpretation. All claims to the contrary that I know, and I know of several, are so much superstition. — Gareth J. Nelson

What's wrong with "the new elite?" Forget cultural insularity or smugness. The main problem with the "new elite" is that they're not an elite at all. That is, they aren't particularly smart, or competent. — Glenn Reynolds

You've changed me forever. And I'll never forget you. — Kiera Cass

One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group. — Lesley Garrett

When I was 16, I moved to Torrance, California to train at a more advanced studio, and by 19, I joined the American Ballet Theatre in New York. It all happened so fast - it was pretty unheard of that someone could train for so few years and become a professional at one of the most elite dance companies in the United States. — Misty Copeland

In Europe, people in the arts are considered part of the intelligentsia; they are considered part of the elite. — Ron Silver

The political terms 'will' and 'popular will' have a long track record in Western history going back to Rousseau. That record is profoundly anti-democratic, essentially inviting elites to interpret what the common people believe and want. In litigious modern America, that would be a judicial elite telling us how we meant to vote or should have voted. — John Leo

The basic issue is whether the financial elite or the government on behalf of the people should have the profit from creating money. — Linda McQuaig

Moreover, even at elite colleges, the personnel attracted to college admissions are seldom themselves part of the intellectual elite. Yet their job is to select students unlike themselves, to be taught by professors unlike themselves, for careers unlike theirs. It can hardly be surprising that admissions personnel are drawn toward non-intellectual criteria and toward ideas not unlike the notion of judging "the whole person," as found among educators at the pre-college level. Over the years, all sorts of criteria from popular psychology and sociological speculation have assumed increasing weight visa-vis such standard intellectual criteria as academic records and test scores. The — Thomas Sowell

Most of all I enjoy central-heating control rooms, where men with higher education, chained to their jobs like dogs to their kennels, write the history of their times as a sort of sociological survey and where I learned how the fourth estate was depopulated and the proletariat went from base to superstructure and how the university-trained elite now carries on its work. — Bohumil Hrabal

Remember one thing as South Africa prepares to go to the polls this week and the world grapples with the ascendancy of the African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma: South Africa is not Zimbabwe.
In South Africa, no one doubts that Wednesday's elections will be free and fair. While there is an unacceptable degree of government corruption, there is no evidence of the wholesale kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe's elite. While there has been the abuse of the organs of state by the ruling ANC, there is not the state terror of Mugabe's Zanu-PF. And while there is a clear left bias to Zuma's ANC, there is no suggestion of the kind of voluntarist experimentation that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees. — Mark Gevisser

In the life of a child of the elite, there are many moments ripe for a grand celebration. There are birth and the inevitable death.In between,various stages of consciousness define the nature and scale of celebration. — K.J. Kilton

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear that this "everybody" is not "everybody." "Everybody" was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized elite groups. Nowadays, "everybody" is the mass alone. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

You help us, they'll lock you up for the rest of your life. — Henry V. O'Neil

Physically as well as psychologically, Dickinson was the opposite of Adams: tall and gaunt, with a somewhat ashen complexion and a deliberate demeanor that conveyed the confidence of his social standing in the Quaker elite and his legal training at the Inns of Court in London. — Joseph J. Ellis

Like most Americans I am no lover of cops, and the consistent investigation of city forces for bribery, brutality, and a long and picturesque list of malfeasances is not designed to reassure me. However, my hostility does not extend to the state troopers now maintained in most parts of the country. By the simple expedient of recruiting intelligent and educated men, paying them adequately, and setting them beyond political coercion, many states have succeeded in creating elite corps of men, secure in their dignity and proud of their service. Eventually our cities may find it necessary to reorganize their police on the pattern of the state police. But this will never happen while political organizations retain the slightest power to reward or to punish. — John Steinbeck

I think there's just been this "thing" that's developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that too! I learned that in graduate school. You just talk about your music in a specific way, and that separates people from you. But some composers like that. Schoenberg liked that. He wanted to feel that he was making music for an elite few. That's fine for him, but I want to set myself free from that sort of attitude. — Missy Mazzoli

There have now been many studies of elite performers - international violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth - and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the cumulative amount of deliberate practice they've had. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself. — Atul Gawande

I've come to learn that leadership is not automatically granted to you because of your position or your salary or the size of your office. Leadership is influence based on trust that you have earned. A leader is not someone who declares what he wants and then gets angry when he doesn't get it. A true leader is someone who is going someplace and taking people with him, a catalyst for elite performance who enables people to achieve things they wouldn't achieve on their own. A leader is someone who earns trust, sets a clear standard, and then equips and inspires people to meet that standard. — Urban Meyer

The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the "legitimate" votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the "real" Americans the Democrats must pursue. — Ellen Willis

Someday our grandchildren will very likely look back at the individual, selfish control of the wealth of the world by a small elite the same way we view slavery today. — Corinne McLaughlin

The whole idea of hobknobbing and schmoozing and the concept of an "elite" class of celebrities better than the common people has always made my stomach turn. — Bill Watterson

Muslims shared many of the deep-seated characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon elite-an intuitive resentment of culture, an amicable contempt for women, a proclivity for riding about on horses, a pleasure in discipline, and a covert homophilia. — James Cameron

It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. — Naomi Klein

Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014.
The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.
"Visit to The World's Fair of 2014," The New York Times, August 1964 — Isaac Asimov

Everyone should have the same opportunity, and in many areas that's not the case because programs are built around the elite. — Bobby Orr

Her disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take, but also knows the championship is one game away. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

To me, it doesn't matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine. — Robert Anton Wilson

Elite runners are genetically gifted, sure, but without intense training, those gifts are wasted. Their training creates a strong work ethic that leaves humility in its wake. There are no short cuts in marathoning, so anyone who is a marathoner has worked hard. — Jeff Horowitz

Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody's equal. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Extreme inequality and financial crisis usually coincide. But the elite who cause it usually come out OK. And they are usually man. — Katrine Marcal

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people. — Tom Clancy

The fundamental weakness in the Tea Party machine is the stark difference between what the leaders of the Tea Party elite - plutocrats like the Koch Brothers -want and what the average grassroots Tea Party follower wants. — Chuck Schumer

As countries embrace mass higher education, the cost of maintaining universities increases dramatically relative to an elite system. — Derek Bok

Rent-control laws disproportionately benefit the non-poor because the elite pull strings, work the system and are better connected than the non-poor. — Larry Elder

The custom to put others in the line of fire is a recurring theme in Judaism. It boils down to the Levite Korahites' willingness to sacrifice their ordinary Jewish subjects in order to ensure their own survival. This should be a historic warning to modern-day Israelites: their orthodox government would not hesitate to risk the lives of the many for the sake of the survival of the few in the orthodox elite. The citizens of Israel will have to think about how to remove the systemic threat that comes from within their own ranks. — A.J. Deus

Dissent, protest, presures of a wide variety that escape elite control can modify the calculus of costs of planners, and offer a slight hope that Washington can be compelled to permit at least some steps towards "justice, freedom and democracy" within its domains. — Noam Chomsky

Mengistu seemed to symbolize the revolution. He was the baria, the slave who overthrew the master, the member of the conquered tribe who got even with the conquerors, the poorly educated son of a servant who rose against the intellectual elite. — Mengistu Haile Mariam

Looking, acting, and ultimately being Prep is not restricted to an elite minority lucky enough to attend prestigious private schools, just because an ancestor or two happened to arrive here on the Mayflower. You don't even have to be a registered Republican. — Lisa Birnbach

fundamental to the concept of an elite is the idea that its members must merit their status in the judgment of others and that they must continually prove by their behavior and actions that they deserve their superior position in society. — Thomas R. Martin

The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things - war and hunger and date rape - liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things ... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal. — P. J. O'Rourke

What mattered most, as I came to realize, was who'd lived in Vegas the longest, which was why the knock-down Mexican beauties and itinerant construction heirs sat alone at lunch while the bland, middling children of local realtors and car dealers were the cheerleaders and class presidents, the unchallenged elite of the school. — Donna Tartt

The self-anointed media elite among us believe, somewhat self-servingly, that not only the act, or process of making a profit is positively sinister, but also that the very desire to do so is. — Lachlan Murdoch

I'm an enemy of what I call 'computer theology.' There's a class conflict out there. There's a techno-elite that lives in a different world. — Walt Mossberg

The label of 'marathoner' has, from the beginning, been awarded to those who went the distance under their own power, whether they ran, walked, crawled or tiptoed. When you cross that finish line, you've entered an elite group. About one-tenth of one percent of the population has done it. Don't let anyone take that great achievement away from you. — Jeff Galloway

We will never have the elite smart people on our side. — Rick Santorum

I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be. — Kenneth Branagh

The hope of Internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the Internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information, or restrict Internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the 21st century, as North Korea has done. — Peter Singer

Knowledge is not just the preserve of the educated elite. Just because someone has not had a formal education, that does not mean he does not have wisdom and common sense. — Vikas Swarup

Food as a hobby used to be an elite pastime, and it has become something that is totally ordinary for people of every background. In that way, we see the growing up of the American food scene: that it's okay to be a regular person and be really into food. — Dana Goodyear

Investment that only goes to enrich an already wealthy elite bent on monopolizing both economic and political power cannot contribute toward egalite and justice
the foundation stones for a sound democracy. — Aung San Suu Kyi

Deism" in its own day referred not to a superficial theological doctrine but to a comprehensive intellectual tradition that ranged freely across the terrain we now associate with ethics, political theory, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology. It was an astonishingly coherent and systematic body of thought, closer to a way of being than any particular dogma, and it retained its essential elements over a span of centuries, not decades. In origin and substance, deism was neither British nor Christian, as the conventional view supposes, but largely ancient, pagan, and continental, and it spread in America far beyond the educated elite. — Matthew Stewart

Why so surprised, White Wolf? he murmurs, smiling a little. There is something in the way he says my Elite name, a secret sweetness.
Why so surprised that you are worthy? — Marie Lu

All SEALS in my mind are equally elite. It doesn't matter if you're SEAL Team Two, One, Six, 10, it doesn't matter. All SEALS are equally elite. — Howard E. Wasdin

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded ... in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite. — Steven Pinker

Your Holiness, elite education makes us arrogant, conceited. It makes us think we are the answers to everything. You know what this expensive education does to us? It destroys us. — Dalai Lama XIV

Then there was the gray of human habitation. The blue places were turning brown, the yellow places to dust, the green places to smoke and ashes. Each time one of the animals disappeared
they went by species or sometimes by organizations of species, interconnected
it was as though all mountains were gone, or all lakes. A certain form of the world. But in the gray that metastasized over continents and hemispheres few appeared to be deterred by this extinguishing or even to speak of it, no one outside fringe elements and elite groups, professors and hippies, small populations of little general importance. The quiet mass disappearance, the inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed. — Lydia Millet

[As a kid] I felt it was really weird that music schools behaved like a conveyor belt to make performers for those symphony orchestras. If you were really good and practiced your violin for a few hours a day for ten years you might be invited to this VIP elite club. For me music was not about that. It is about freedom and expression and individuality and impulsiveness and spontaneity. It wasn't so Apollonian; it was more Dionysian. — Bjork

We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don't spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options. — Malcolm Gladwell

It is true that as World War II recedes into the mists of time, almost all big-hearted progressives or liberals (or whatever self-congratulatory term they apply to themselves) denounce Nazism and fascism with the utmost ardor. Yet when these odious movements were on the rise, many among the British elite cautioned prudence in dealing with them; and some actually admired them, including members of the royal family and, of course, clerics in the Anglican Church. — R. Emmett Tyrrell

By 1998, members of the United States National Academy of Sciences, an elite elected group sponsored by the federal government, were approaching complete atheism. Only 10 percent testified to a belief in either God or immortality. Among them were a scant 2 percent of the biologists. In modern civilizations, there is no overwhelming importance in the general populace to belong to an organized religion. Witness, — Edward O. Wilson

When the Navy sends their elite, they send the SEALs. When the SEALs send their elite, they send SEAL Team Six. — Stephen Templin

DREAM PREDICTION ELITE is the realization of true amazement in your audiences reactions. This is PURE GOLD - A REAL WINNER — Banachek

An idea is only an idea if it causes unease, debate and reflection. By that standard, Thomas Homer-Dixon's concept of an 'ingenuity gap' is truly a new idea. I can think of no other new concept that so fully condenses all of the challenges we face as a human civilization than the 'ingenuity gap'. Homer-Dixon has found a way to unite all of our concerns about economics, war, population growth, complexity, etc. under a single heading. He is one of an elite group of academics who can write for a mass audience. — Robert D. Kaplan

The firing of nerves in the amygdala, thereby dampening fear. Laughter, then, can help to temper negative emotions. And while all this might seem of purely academic interest, it could prove helpful when your partner breaks his leg at 19,000 feet in a blizzard on a Peruvian mountain. It is not a lack of fear that separates elite performers from the rest of us. They're afraid, too, but they're not overwhelmed by it. They manage fear. They use it to focus on taking correct action. Mike Tyson's trainer, Cus D'Amato, said, Fear is like fire. It can cook for you. It can heat your — Laurence Gonzales

You stay elite by constantly moving forward. — Bob Myers

But wine was the great assassin of both tradition and propriety, and now the Alethi elite danced with abandon. — Brandon Sanderson

Technological progress becomes even more exciting when it enters into the service of the social idea which demands that not only a small elite but humanity at large should profit by it. — Rudolf Christoph Eucken

Louie Bellson represents the epitome of musical talent. His ability to cover the whole musical spectrum from an elite percussionist to a very gifted composer and arranger never ceases to amaze me. I consider him one of the musical giants of our age. — Oscar Peterson

Girls, here's the truth about the Ban Bossy campaign: It's being spearheaded by a privileged group of elite feminists who have a very vested interest in stoking victim politics and exacerbating the gender divide. They actually encourage dependency and groupthink while paying lip service to empowerment and self-determination. They traffic in bogus wage disparity statistics, whitewashing the fact that what's actually left of that dwindling pay gap is due to the deliberate, voluntary choices women in the workforce make. — Michelle Malkin

Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. — Ronald Reagan

As kids, we were taught to be the psychological equivalent of Navy SEALS- an elite parochial-school unit, drilled to take life's blows on the chin without wincing. — Maureen Corrigan

Other children would be sent to England for school and they would come back to form an elite class." Next to him, Marjorie shifted her weight, and Marcus tried not to look at her. It was the way most people lived their lives, on upper levels, not stopping to peer underneath. — Yaa Gyasi

In India, if you are from the elite, dogs are extremely important. The breed of the dog indicates your wealth, that you are westernized. The cook, another human being, is on a much lower level than your dog. You see this all the time. — Kiran Desai

It gave me a feeling of temporary acceptance into that elite community, to stroll across the quad at his side. It also gave me my first faint quiver of sexual belonging, the elusive feeling that if I slipped my hand into his as we walked along, a door would fall open somewhere in the long wall of reality as I knew it, never to be closed again. — Elizabeth Kostova

Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They — Yuval Noah Harari

Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the liberal elite. And we can't blame taxpayers for being reluctant to subsidize the reportorial careers of J-school twerps who should have joined the Peace Corps and gone to Africa to 'speak truth to power' to Robert Mugabe. — P. J. O'Rourke

The farmers had grown proud and haughty. They ate better than anyone else in Germany now. And, like Volkswagen and Siemens, they had slaves. All they had to do was feed the local Nazi power elite, and they could have all the slaves they wanted. — Edith Hahn Beer

Leo Tolstoy's A Confession is possibly the most important document of the last two centuries for understanding our current plight. The dogmas of modern unbelief had captured his elite circle of Russian intellectuals, artists, and members of the social upper crust, and the implications of it slowly destroyed the basis of his life. On those dogmas only two things are real: particles and progress. "Why do I live?" he asked. And the answer he got was, "In infinite space, in infinite time, infinitely small particles change their forms in infinite complexity, and when you have understood the laws of those mutations of form you will understand why you live on the earth". — Dallas Willard

Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as "superconsumers," able to carry consumer demand all on their own. — Naomi Klein

In Parton's telling, the Village is "a permanent D.C. ruling class who has managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth."17 It's not just the activist base of the left and the right who have recognized the widespread elite failure; more and more individual elites have broken ranks to acknowledge their own responsibility. — Christopher L. Hayes

The Christian church in the U.S. is still strong numerically, but it has lost its decisive influence both in American public life and in American culture as a whole, especially in the major elite institutions of society. — Os Guinness

The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed. — Susan Sontag

Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are. — Kenneth Rexroth

He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy. — F Scott Fitzgerald

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage ... Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For longer than I've been involved in the political process, the Republican establishment has claimed to want to provide an alternative for the black community, yet party elite refuse to show up for the game. — J. C. Watts

A society that is controlled by an elite minority group who use the population as a food source, will never know civility — Alejandro C. Estrada